Can you post up the whole study 0lease. Or is it like one of them trump ones where you only get to pick agree/strongly agree/amazeballs
& there it is,
1 Like
I’m Labour mate. Surprised you never knew.
Sure labour, by extension, are part of FFG
1 Like
Who’s olease?
3 Likes
What are the 1/5 thinking??
That’s Gemma
How a Pandemic Rescued the Political Image of Ireland’s Leader
Leo Varadkar is winning praise after reactivating his registration as a medical doctor and heading to the coronavirus front lines.
Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland, left, visited the National Virus Reference Laboratory in Dublin last month. Dr. Varadkar, still in office as a caretaker, reactivated his registration as a medical doctor.Credit…Aidan Crawley/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Mark Landler
- Published April 11, 2020Updated April 12, 2020, 3:39 p.m. ET
LONDON — Just two months ago, Ireland’s leader, Leo Varadkar, was a spent force in Irish politics: a trailblazing prime minister whose failure to solve Ireland’s housing crisis frustrated voters and whose aloof style left them cold. In a three-way Parliamentary race in February, his party finished last.
Last month, Dr. Varadkar, still in office as a caretaker, reactivated his registration as a medical doctor and said he would spend half a day each week fielding calls from people who believe they have contracted the coronavirus. What many Irish might have once dismissed as a shameless publicity stunt was instead greeted with broad support — a retired doctor doing his bit to help a great national effort.
To the list of politicians whose fortunes have been rescued by the pandemic, add Leo Varadkar’s name.
Ireland has not escaped the scourge of the coronavirus, with 263 deaths, 6,574 confirmed cases, and the expectation is that both numbers will spike in the coming weeks. Its death rate is somewhat lower than Britain’s, while its reported rate of infection is slightly higher.
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Yet Dr. Varadkar, 41, is winning praise for his energetic handling of the crisis. He canceled St. Patrick’s Day festivities, oversaw an aggressive early testing program, closed pubs and schools earlier than other European leaders and has spoken to the public about the contagion in honest, humane terms — in other words, like the general practitioner he once was.
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“He was at sixes and sevens after the election, but he is perceived as having gotten back on track,” said Pat Leahy, the political editor of The Irish Times. “There is a sense that he showed strong, quick leadership in getting to grips with it.”
He added, “We’re all very familiar with the situation in the U.K.”
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A park in Dublin in March. Ireland counts more than 230 deaths and over 6,000 confirmed coronavirus cases.Credit…Aidan Crawley/EPA, via Shutterstock
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advisers debated how aggressively to curb the spread of the virus, allowing testing to lag. He was reluctant to order pubs and cafes to close, and his relaxed approach to social distancing came back to haunt him when he contracted the virus himself, ending up in an intensive care unit.
With Mr. Johnson bedridden while Dr. Varadkar counsels patients, the comparisons between these neighbors are as inevitable as they are invidious.
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Britain has 13 times the population as Ireland and is far more densely populated, with a capital, London, that has nearly twice as many people as the entire Irish Republic. Its gateway airport, Heathrow, handles 75 million international passengers a year, compared with 31 million for Dublin.
“Some of the difference may be serendipity,” said Dr. Patricia Kearney, an expert in epidemiology at the University College Cork. “We have a relatively small population, and the way we live outside the cities is far less dense than in the U.K. But there was still really decisive action by our political leaders.”
Dr. Varadkar’s performance has not completely escaped criticism. Some people clucked over his decision to keep his annual St. Patrick’s Day date with President Trump in Washington during the early days of the outbreak. While there, he called a dramatic news conference at Blair House, opposite the White House, to announce he was closing Irish schools and banning large gatherings.
Later, the prime minister, or Taoiseach, as he is known in Ireland, was criticized for saying that people might prefer to lose their jobs because they would qualify for a weekly pandemic unemployment payment of 350 euros ($380). That played into a familiar critique that Dr. Varadkar, the son of an Indian-born doctor and an Irish nurse, has little empathy for those in economic hardship.
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Celebrating St Patrick’s Day at home. The festivities in Ireland were canceled and pubs and schools were closed earlier than in other European countries.Credit…Carmel Crimmins/Reuters
But he compensated for those stumbles with an address on St. Patrick’s Day that was viewed by commentators as one of the most memorable ever delivered by an Irish leader.
“We need to halt the spread of the virus, but we also need to halt the spread of fear,” Dr. Varadkar declared. “Fear is a virus in itself.”
Noting that his partner, Matthew Barrett, as well as his sisters and their husbands are employed in health care, he said: “I am so proud of all of them. Not all superheroes wear capes; some wear scrubs and gowns.”
WATCH: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar delivers Ministerial Broadcast to the country about the Covid-19 pandemic | Read more: https://bit.ly/38WYJBh https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1OdKrqbNaWQxX …
[
Ministerial Broadcast by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar
RTÉ News @rtenews
](https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1OdKrqbNaWQxX)
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Dr. Varadkar’s decision to go back to work as a physician was motivated by a desire to help ease the burden on health care workers, his spokesman said. He also issued a plea for emigrant Irish doctors and nurses, and others who had left the field, to return to help with the surge of patients. So far, 60,000 have responded.
The prime minister’s medical career was neither long nor particularly distinguished. He worked as a junior doctor and qualified as a general practitioner in 2010 before leaving to enter politics. His name was removed from Ireland’s medical register in 2013.
To the extent Mr. Varadkar’s training has informed his response to the pandemic, analysts said, it has mainly been in his heeding of expert advice, particularly from Ireland’s chief medical officer, Dr. Tony Holohan. He also has a firsthand grasp of the importance of masks, surgical gloves and gowns.
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Deliveries of medical supplies from China on March 29th.Credit…Aidan Crawley/EPA, via Shutterstock
Last month, Ireland got in early in negotiating a €208 million ($226 million) deal with China for this protective gear and scheduled Aer Lingus flights to bring it back. Some of the gowns had been cut for Chinese medics and were too short for Irish doctors. But today Ireland is not suffering from the shortages that afflict other countries. Nor does it have a shortage of ventilators, thanks to a chain of manufacturers.
At the outset of the contagion, Dr. Kearney said, Ireland aggressively tested and traced the contacts of people with symptoms. That quickly stretched its testing capacity, and it was forced to pull back.
As in Britain, there is now a long backlog of people waiting for tests. Still, while Ireland lags top performers like Iceland and Norway, it has tested at more than double the rate of Britain.
Ireland also moved swiftly to impose social distancing, working off an influenza pandemic plan developed 13 years ago, said Dr. Samuel J. McConkey, an infectious disease and tropical medicine specialist at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
It called off a major rugby match between Ireland and Italy in late February, an unpopular decision at the time. But now, experts said, people are adhering to Ireland’s lockdown better than those in Britain. On Friday, Dr. Varadkar announced the restrictions would stay in place until May 5.
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A closed coffee shop in Dublin on Friday. The country imposed social distancing, working off an influenza pandemic plan developed 13 years ago.Credit…Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
“We’ve all rolled in behind these measures,” Dr. McConkey said. “Even though we’ve had a legacy of shooting at each other over decades, we’re actually quite a socially cohesive society.”
For Dr. Varadkar, the crisis could even give him a role in a new government, something he could scarcely have expected after his defeat. His Fine Gael party is in talks with its archrival Fianna Fail, and the possibility of a unity government is greater than it was before the virus struck, though some find the horse-trading at this time unseemly.
“The prospects for forming that government depend on what happens in the hospitals over the next two to four weeks,” Mr. Leahy said. “Things could switch pretty violently if the outbreak gets bad.”
Anna Joyce contributed reporting from Dublin.
I had a dream. Actually, it was a daydream, and nothing as portentous as Martin Luther King’s vision. In my dream I was perspiring and my mucous membranes were streaming. I rang the HSE’s Covid-19 phone line. A doctor asked me to describe my symptoms, which I did in gory technicolour. Next, he asked for my date of birth. I had got as far as December when it struck me I knew that voice. It was the taoiseach. That was when I started properly sweating, and hung up, mortified.
Who wants to share their intimate aches, age and medical history with the guy running the country? Not me. When next he has his taoiseach’s cap back on, I may have to ask Leo Varadkar hard questions about how his government is managing the pandemic. Looking him unflinching in the eye could prove a challenge when he is there, thinking, “Ah, the hypochondriac with a mild dose of April hay fever”.
But, please, don’t let that stop everyone else.
Once a week now, Varadkar rips off his sharp office suit and pulls on his boxers over his tights to come over all Clark Kent and soar to the rescue of the citizens. When it was disclosed to journalists — by an unidentified informed source — that Ireland’s political leader had reregistered in March as a medical doctor to help combat Covid-19, CNN, Euronews, ABC and Newsweek reported the story. So too Fox News — ergo, it must be true.
Indeed, it is true, confirmed the taoiseach’s own (spin) doctor. He called his boss “Doctor Varadkar”. Newspaper reports of it were printed in a bold font of sans-serif awe.
The kneejerk impulse is to be cynical. Here is a taoiseach freshly dumped by the voters. While waiting for the removal van to pull up outside Government Buildings, he finds himself catapulted into taking caretaker charge of a lethal global contagion. The economy is wiped out. Every day brings news of more infections, more deaths. Yet, bizarrely, the popularity of leaders around the world starts rising, including that of some erstwhile coronavirus-deniers. Did Donald “It’ll go away” Trump just flit through your mind?
Varadkar too has been feeling the love of the people. Opinion polls show strong public support for his government’s handling of the emergency. His own popularity is up by 13%. How best to maximise those gains as he prepares to re-enter government on the arm of his greatest rival, Fianna Fail? Simple: don’t just talk the talk; walk the walk. Not all superheroes wear capes, he told us early on — “some wear scrubs and gowns”. And so, as poor Boris Johnson was being trolleyed to intensive care in London, the taoiseach was metaphorically polishing his stethoscope to vanquish the viral villain.
And full marks to him. This is a man who has never wasted an opportunity to remind the country that he is a doctor. Treating sick people is in his DNA. His mother and father, his partner, his two sisters and their husbands are doctors and nurses. The taoiseach will have been hearing from his family about the pressures and traumas they face. Having beseeched other doctors who had moved away from Ireland, or from their profession, to return in their country’s hour of need, he would have been accused of rank hypocrisy had he not responded to his own call. Can’t you just hear the begrudgers? “Too important to roll up his own sleeves, is he?” they’d have sneered.
Besides, it is not as if he is deserting the day job. Despite the public health catastrophe, Varadkar’s workload as taoiseach has lightened since the dawn of this surreal age of suspended motion. His overseas travel has been grounded. There are no flights to EU summits or Brexit strategy meetings; there is no worldwide lobbying to win a seat on the UN security council.
Gone too are the routine Dail slots for leaders’ questions, followed by taoiseach’s questions, thus freeing up several hours in his working week. Anyway, aren’t the shots really being called in Merrion Street during these upside-down times by the chief medical officer Tony Holohan, the HSE’s director-general Paul Reid, and Philip Nolan of the National Emergency Public Health Team? Despite its multifarious consequences for the economy, education, social protection, employment and business, Covid-19 is the only item on the national agenda. Even Brexit, which convulsed the Irish body politic for four years, has been relegated to “any other business”.
Varadkar’s presence is not required for government formation talks, either. Neither he nor Micheál Martin have been attending the negotiations between the Fine Gael and Fianna Fail teams. Martin has been a consistent critic of his Fine Gael counterpart’s compulsion to control the narrative. Or, as the Fianna Fail leader puts it, his obsession with spin. When the taoiseach established the strategic communications unit in his own department, Martin zoomed in on it with microscopic scrutiny. Eventually, he was proven right when the unit’s publicity for the national development plan flagrantly provided good-news platforms for Fine Gael politicians, and its newspaper advertisements masqueraded as objective journalism. The unit was scrapped in 2018.
The recent return to Government Buildings of John Concannon, who ran the strategic communications unit, may give succour to conspiracy theorists that Varadkar’s double-jobbing as a doctor is a crass PR stunt. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. And just because you’re a paragon of puffery doesn’t mean everything you do is for propaganda reasons.
It’s not as if the taoiseach is recklessly putting his health in danger at the Covid-19 frontline. When he dons his Superman shirt for his weekly healthcare stint, he is not exposing himself to infected patients, because his contribution is confined to physically distanced telephone assessments.
As the country’s shutdown continues and the fine weather tries to tease us out of our obligatory quarantine, Varadkar’s decision to dust off his medical bag is a reminder of the gravity of our collective situation. It says this is not the time for our resolve to crack. It says our fellow citizens are falling ill and many are dying. It says that, sometimes, being the taoiseach is not the most important job in the land. It says that tending the sick trumps everything as the numbers pile up.
I hope Varadkar remembers this in the years to come when austere budget cuts are required to restore the economy to health. I hope he remembers the invaluable contributions of doctors, nurses, hospital porters, postmen and women, supermarket workers and bin collectors.
Meanwhile, when next we stand outside our front doors to applaud Ireland’s healthcare workers, I, for one, will be applauding a certain Doctor Varadkar too.
I’d say Justine would be savage in the scratcher
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What a cunt
Leo Varadkar T.D.
28 mins ·
Been trying to respond to all the great letters I’ve been getting. Thanks everyone who stayed home and stayed safe this bank holiday weekend. #StayHomeSaveLives #Covid19 #CoronaKindness
Hope he’s done under the data protection act.
Kids in Clontarf say mommy ffs.
This will drive the usual suspects demented
Leo! Leo! Leo!
Leo is at the top of his game at the minute.